Christ, thank God for that. I was busy worrying about the nameless horror that was going to confront me at every corner, but it was just an architectural quirk. (Actually wasn't the house in The Haunting built like that? That film allus gave me the willies as well).

xpost No!!!!! (Leaves final insane thoughts on stylogram and sends to cousin)

"This scenario is a complex one. Mood and confusion play large parts in the evolving story—confusion over loyalties, allegiances, identities, and even the morality of duty. In the end the investigators find great responsibilities in their hands, and discover that the burden is not one they can ever put down."

find out what happens when explorers stop being polite...and start getting real

DNY: As director, you could have gone to work for Warner Bros, doing a Wizard of Oz movie, and, I’ve heard, the studio wanted you to resurrect Superman...

Del Toro: There were other projects [he laughs].

DNY: That’s diplomatic. Why did you instead choose At the Mountains of Madness, a much harder picture to get greenlit?

Del Toro : I came out of The Hobbit, and it was the biggest heartbreak I’ve experienced as a filmmaker, because I will never know what that movie would have been. I was very mindful that I didn’t want to have a rebound movie, as happens sometimes when somebody comes off a long romance. There were very big, lucrative, beautiful projects on the table, and I was developing one of them with Jim Cameron. In my stubborn fashion, I slipped Jim the script, again, when we were meeting on that other project. He said, you still want to do that? To his credit, he said, well, let’s pursue that instead. This is the movie I most want to do. I haven’t done horror in a long time. Devil’s Backbone tries to make the ghost a victim, and not a scary character. Blade 2 is more action than horror. I really love the genre and last time I did a horror film was Mimic, and that was not a horror for the right reasons. That’s a muscle I want to flex. Frankenstein has the mitigating factor that for a length of the narrative, you favor the monster. For horror to work, you have to be afraid. You have to keep the monster in a black and white light. I mostly love monsters too much to see them in that light, but Lovecraft allows me to.

DNY: Because the villain is an otherworldly species?

Del Toro: Because the proportion is so big. When the monster has a dimension that allows you to humanize it, that’s the route I usually want to go. The cosmic proportions of the Lovecraft horror are so immense, it forces you to find humanity in other aspects of the tale. You can keep the monster inhuman, remote and scary, which is a great benefit.

DNY: Universal needed to be convinced to make this film, which is a bold play. I’ve heard there was a meeting with you, Jim, Ron Meyer and his Universal execs that swung the deal. How did you walk away with a yes?

Del Toro: Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley have always been friends of the project. The screenplay that is on the internet is an old screenplay, and the one I gave to Jim and Universal is different. When I came back from The Hobbit, I gave my Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington speech at Universal. I pitch with heart on sleeve, and Donna and Adam were moved, liked the new take and said, let’s develop it hard. But I wanted to be shooting by June next year. I didn’t want to let another year go by without shooting, it made no sense. So Jim, Jon Landau, Rae Sanchini, came with me for that big meeting. Jim and I were able to do a double tag team, talking about the world and the experience that Mountains would be. We found new ways for them to see it, and they agreed to investigate it further. We are not green lit, we are still budgeting and designing, and we are partners on this. I believe in my heart we are going to be making this movie in June of next year. We are budgeting the creatures and met with Spectral Motion and ILM, where Dennis Muren told me the sweetest words ever when he said, no one has ever seen monsters like this. That was truly one of the highlights of my fat life, a demigod like Muren saying that.

In a conversation with 24 Frames Monday, Del Toro said he's actively engaged with the project and moving ahead with the tale of the mysteries and monsters on an Antarctic expedition. In fact, just last week Del Toro met with studio Universal for the so-called summit meeting in which he walked executives through his concepts and models for the movie. The script is also ready, he said.

So how soon could shooting begin? This summer, he hopes, and possibly as early as June, according to the filmmaker.

And lest you think producer James Cameron is simply putting his name on it while he's off working on "Avatar 2", think again: The "Terminator" director was present for the summit meeting and has been offering Del Toro some notes.

"In his subtle style he said to me, 'I have a few notes, but I have one fatal flaw [that I see in the script],'" Del Toro recalled. "He pointed out one thing that was big. I've been thinking about this for 35 years, and he pointed out something I'd never seen."

"There's not enough of that mystical rainforest giggling children shit."

After three months of deliberation, Universal Pictures, the studio that gave del Toro money for pre-production creature designs, has remained unwilling to give the director a greenlight, citing concerns over the film’s budget and likely R rating. On Monday, del Toro withdrew from the negotiations, and that night at ten-thirty he sent me a short, mournful e-mail:

Madness has gone dark. The ‘R’ did us in.

Del Toro had told me that he would not compromise on the film’s rating, even though a film rated PG-13 would have a much easier time attracting a mass audience. “Madness,” as he imagined it, would not be particularly gory, but he insisted that he needed the artistic freedom “to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty.” Del Toro had hoped that a greenlight for “Madness” would mark a new golden age for horror films:

Del Toro envisaged “Madness” as a “hard R” epic, shot in 3-D, with a blockbuster budget. Creating dozens of morphing creatures would be expensive, and much of the film needed to be shot somewhere that approximated Antarctica; one of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecraft’s novella is that the explorers are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production. But a “tent-pole horror film,” as del Toro put it, hadn’t been made in years. High-budget productions such as “Alien” and “The Shining” had been followed by decades of cheaper thrills. “The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a clandestine genre,” he said. “It lives and breathes—‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ the first ‘Saw,’ ‘The Blair Witch Project’—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.” He mentioned Hitchcock’s “The Birds”: “It was a major filmmaker using cutting-edge optical technology and special effects. It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the polished aspects of a studio film.”

According to Deadline.com, Universal executives felt that “Madness” would need to make at least five hundred million dollars in worldwide grosses in order to turn a profit, considering global marketing costs. It is possible that del Toro will now present the project to another studio.

Universal badly wanted to be in the Guillermo Del Toro business. It was a priority to them, and when they made "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army," that was in large part a show of faith on the part of the studio. They wanted to make "Frankenstein" with Guillermo. They wanted to give him a home for his particular voice and vision. And when it came down to it, after a few years marked by expensive filmmmaker-driven flops and sure-thing properties that failed and cult fanboy favorites that no one turned out for, they looked at that R-rated $150 million horror film and said, "We can't." Not that they didn't want to, or that they don't believe in Guillermo, or that they want to make crap instead. They looked at the money they've made, the money they've lost, the choices that have led them to this place, and they said, "We can't."

It was a no brainer that this would never be made the second they announced that del Toro wanted to make it. Besides, Carpenter already did the mutating gory monster in Antarctica thing as well as anyone ever will. For a visionary, del Toro is having some trouble getting the vision-thing working for him. "Madness" was never feasible, "Frankenstein" would be a disaster, "The Hobbit" was a poor fit. And yet, "Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth," his best movies, were both original scripts. Stick to your strengths, big guy! You've got great, original ideas. Make a movie out of your great, original ideas!